


Exiled from Eden (when Eden means home)

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [5]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Cults, Gen, Jewish Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 01:53:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5808775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dag grows up with mud between her toes, until she loses it, and learns dust like the back of her hands, and remembers things older than her on her fingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am SO SORRY this has been so slow to update. I promise I am writing lots of things!! I'm just...not writing them in the right order to post them. :(

The Dag was born in the mountains of the Wasteland with blood on her face. She always thought she’d die the same way. Her mother had died giving her life, and her milk mother died from fallout three years after that, and after that the only person in her life who wouldn’t die was her Teacher. 

Their clan lived in the sheltered lee of a mountainside, not quite a cave but not quite a canyon either, where sweet water had made an oasis of the red stone walls. There was corn and beans and blackwood wattles, and they were hidden from both storms and scavengers. 

The Dag was an enchanter’s child, the uncanny girl who sat silent at the fire for hours, staring like the flames would vanish if she looked away. She was the eldritch ghost, her silver-white hair shining and her constant questions burrs in the ears of her people. “Why?” She would ask her Teacher, every day. “Why is the sun bright? Why is the sky blue?” And her favorite one, “What’s that word mean?”

Her daemon was Pheona, the solid voice to her ethereal one. It was Pheona who would wake her up in the black mornings with a dog’s soft licks, when dew was thick on the leaves of their hidden oasis and chores needed doing. Pheona who stood lookout as a meerkat when the Dag was out of the protection of their canyon, looking for rock lizards to hunt or rabbits to catch. 

The Dag grew up knowing seeds and dirt and water. She was the daughter of no one, who ran as wild as she could and obeyed only the Teacher, who was thousands and thousands of days old, who kept three books in a water-proof bag in his tent and taught the Dag to read them. For that treasure, she would have gone to the ends of the dead Earth with him. 

When she was fourteen, he asked her to.

When she was fourteen, the water dried up. 

When she was fourteen, her oasis went black and sour, and three people died of bad water before Teacher asked them to leave. “We will wander in the desert like our ancestors once did. There is no life left for us here.” 

The Dag sat on an old oil barrel, now full of water they had boiled over bonfires of their dead crops. Teacher was right. There was no living here anymore. Pheona was sitting at her feet, settled as a vixen with russet red fur dark as sunset, animal eyes glittering with the newness and the danger of it all. 

“We will wander, if we must last for forty years,” Teacher reached down to brush old, swollen fingers over the bag at his side, his goldfinch daemon perched on a wrinkle of his shirt. The bag that held his three books, last of a dead world. “And in the end, we must have faith that we will be delivered from the Wastes, as our ancestors were.”

“All we have is a couple of barrels of water and less than a month’s worth of food. What good will faith do us when they run out?” It was Mad Iggy, whose eyes pointed out and rolled wildly in her head, who spoke, but Pheona watched the people, listened with her clever fox-ears, and there was anger welling up under their silence. Iggy was just the crack along which their steam vented.

“Then we will pray that we’ve found others by then. We know there are people who live there, out beyond these walls. Humanity, no matter how wretched, survives.”

“And you want us to beg for food? Or more likely, starve in the sands? If we meet other humans out there, they’ll kill us and roast our bones for stew.” That was Jump, who had been one of the rare people who found their way into the oasis, and whose tendency towards casual violence kept the Dag and Pheona well away from him. 

“Others may turn to cannibalism and black ways, but we will keep to the teachings of God, and we will prevail.” Teacher turned a heavy eye on Jump, and the anger in the crowd faded back. The Dag was well aware of how dangerous the Wastes were; it was what she heard most often from the clan. Outside was deadly, outside was dangerous, there was nothing outside but death and dust. 

It had all the pull of a forbidden place, and the Dag had to run a bare foot along Pheona’s spine to flatten her fur and disguise her excitement. The adults were obviously upset about it; even Teacher’s goldfinch daemon was too agitated to settle on his shoulder, but fluttered about his hands and clung to the wrinkles on his shirt. But there was no choice in the leaving that took hold of them, and the Dag was sorry only in the abstract, careless way of children.


	2. Chapter 2

They did not travel for forty years, but the Dag counted the days. Her boots were made of old tires and corn-husks. She wore water on her back and tried desperately to keep up with the longer legs of her Teacher, who walked with his hands on the ropes tied to his back, to keep their food lashed tight across it. The Dag bound up her hair with a bit of twine and Pheona trotted at her side, fox-feet leaving neat tracks behind her in the open sand. It was the strangest thing she had ever done, to walk and walk and walk and never go back home. To not have a home to go back to.

On the fifteenth day, the Dag confided that she didn’t like it very much. “It’s not just the sand and the food and the water that tastes like rust,” she whispered to Pheona, digging idly at the half-formed scabs on her feet where the straps of her sandals rubbed. “It’s the not _being_ anywhere. It feels like we’re not even in this place, here. Like we’ll never get out of this nowhere.”

Her vixen snorted in agreement, curling her feet up underneath her and looking out across the sand, towards where their Teacher lay curled around the boxes of precious food. “We walk all day, and even the mountains are gone. There’s nothing but sand, and the sand is made of nowhere.”

“I don’t like it.” 

“But what can we do?”

The Dag picked at her lip sullenly, watching the sickle moon wind its way around the sky. “Nothing.” 

“So then we walk. We can’t stay nowhere forever. Sooner or later, something will push back.”

“Or someone,” the Dag said, wincing as she pulled away a piece of skin too deep and let salty blood flow out.

***

She counted sixty-three days in that Nowhere, and then they were attacked. It was only one car, rolling over the hill behind them barely faster than walking, but Pheona froze with her ears standing straight up and her legs stiff. The drivers, whoever they were, shrieked when they caught sight of the Dag and her people. It was an inhuman sound, shrill and terrifying, and she didn’t stop to think before she took off running.

One of her clan’s men screamed when the gunshots started; the Dag couldn’t see who. The engine cracked and growled behind them like a monster from one of Teacher’s books, and neither she nor Pheona had been around the metal beasts long enough to understand why the thing kept misfiring, loud as a gunshot, why it couldn’t seem to move fast enough to run them down. Fast enough to catch them, certainly, and the Dag watched Jump’s hound daemon fall and writhe and vanish in front of her, when Jump caught a bullet in his back. But the car groaned and stuttered, the driver caught loose sand, and the Dag threw herself over Pheona when the stinging wave passed too close. 

This, then, was what danger truly meant. This, then, was the monstrous Wasteland come to gobble her up. The Dag thought that she should stand up, keep running, but Pheona was shivering in her arms and she honestly didn’t know if either of them _could_. Her feet had been raw before her run, and now she had a second to absorb the stinging, burning pain that ran through them with every heartbeat. So she stayed, half-buried already in the dust thrown up by the wheels of an angry monster, and waited for the way her bones would crunch as it ate her. 

The next pass never came. Instead, there was another flurry of gunshots and a final scream from the engine, and then quiet. It was not silent; people still screamed, and daemons howled, and underneath that someone was sobbing so hard they couldn’t breathe. The Dag held still, and shivered, until a familiar voice, strong with command but shaking still, called her up out of the dust. 

“Get up!” Teacher shouted, and when she raised her head there was a rifle in his hands. “Get up or stay here and die!” His goldfinch daemon kept echoing him, like words shouted into a rain barrel. The Dag stumbled to her feet, hands shaking, and Pheona pulled herself out of the sand, shook herself off. 

Ten others came up as well, out of the twenty that had survived the first sixty-three days. Teacher stalked over to the car, the gun black as death in his hands and held as easily as he’d held the Chumash for her to read. But nothing in that monster stirred, and he hauled the bodies out. Cholla and Pin went to help him, Cholla with her strong-armed baboon daemon and Pin with her own two arms. 

The Dag flinched when the bodies came out onto the sand, limp and wet as newborns. Despite her horror, she didn’t call back Pheona when the vixen crept closer, the smell of blood strong in her sharp nose. There were bullet holes bleeding like flowers in the chests of both drivers, but their faces were covered in masks made of cloth, without even holes for eyes, and their wraps were made from some kind of leather, cured badly so that it stank enough to add another layer to the toxic _death_ that surrounded the two. None of the adults seemed to notice the beautiful monstrosity lying at their feet, but picked at the car like buzzards, already crowing over finds of water and food in the back seats. 

Teacher, of all of them, saw Pheona’s stiff-legged terror, the Dag’s trembling stillness, and he moved away, around the front of the dead beast of a car, to speak to her. But he didn’t even look at the bodies, brushed against one as if it’d been nothing but another piece of the Wasteland, and the Dag flinched away when he went down on one knee. 

“Look away, little dag,” he said. “Look away now.”


	3. Chapter 3

They found the new oasis after ninety-one days. There had been no more attacks, though more than once the Dag had found herself walking across old tire tracks, clearly visible in the firmer ground of the stone-hills where they climbed now. No signs of human life, though Pheona had caught several lizards to be added to the pot. The Dag bit her lip every time her daemon came back with blood on her teeth, but she slurped down the heavy slurry of half-cooked grain and water and meat just as fast as the others. Her feet had begun to scar, though not after she’d tried to abandon the bloody ‘shoes.’ It had lasted all of ten steps, the time it took for uncomfortable heat to turn to burning in the soles of her feet. She decided she’d rather have cuts and bruises than burns.

She had cut her hair on the sixty-ninth day. She took Mad Iggy’s knife to do it, gathered her long, moon-light hair in one bunch and sawed through it. The Dag would have left it on the sand behind them, but Teacher made her pick it up and wrap it around her hands. For a day or two, the straps of her water harness didn’t cut her so bad, but then the fine strands wore through and she was back to the start. 

On the ninety-first day, the sun rose pink in a yellow sky. The Dag picked up bits of the rocky sand and let it trickle through her fingers, marking another day in Nowhere. Then each one of them got a sip of water, to ease the dust and cough of sleeping, and then they started walking. There were only six of them left now, counting the Dag. And she could tell herself that she’d known they were going to die, but knowing was so different from seeing the bodies of her family drop to the ground around her, and she did not have the energy to look at them or help them up or even to stop walking. To stop walking would mean she’d have to start again, before the others left her behind, and if she stopped she did not know if she could move again. 

On the ninety-first day, it was Pheona who smelled water first. She was the largest daemon left; Teacher had his goldfinch, and Mad Iggy her kangaroo rat, and besides them there was a corn snake, a lemur, and a bluejay. 

Pheona smelled water, and she stopped walking. It took the Dag a few steps to realize what had happened; she was too lost in the walking to notice that her daemon was no longer at her side. Then she rocked to a stop, her body crying out in relief, and looked back. The vixen’s nose was twitching, her excitement growing like a dune wave through the Dag’s chest, and she broke the crust of dust on her throat to call a wordless halt. 

“Water!” Pheona barked, her voice so hoarse it was barely understandable. “I smell water! I smell it, clean and clear!” 

The others stumbled to a stop, and Teacher looked back like he didn’t dare believe what she had said. “What?” He snapped, and the Dag had never heard him sound so angry. 

But it didn’t matter how angry he was: there was water. Pheona knew it for the truth, and so the Dag knew it too. And neither of them bothered to repeat themselves, because everyone had heard. Pheona turned and started off towards a dip in the earth, where a mirage was shimmering, and the Dag stepped out at the same moment her daemon did. After a moment, they heard the shuffle of their clan mates following, and if they thought the Dag and Pheona were lying, they obviously didn’t care. One direction was as good as another, in this Wasteland. 

But at the center of the dip, after the mirage had gone, there was wetness left on the surface of the earth, and it was real. The Dag fell to her hands and knees, licking up the rich wetness without caring whether or not it was poison; it was sweet and good and the cracks in her belly and throat started to close. Pheona had her nose pressed into the dirt as well, though she needed no moisture to survive, and was soon crowded out by the humans around them. 

Eventually the Dag looked up, and for some reason Teacher was watching her instead of drinking. There was mud on her face and on her neck and chest, and it was the best feeling in the world. “It’s better than milk and honey,” she said, not sure if she was really speaking to _him_. At first he didn’t answer, either, just stood there with his daemon on his shoulder, watching. 

“That it is, child,” Teacher said at last, and he went to one knee, slowly and with great pain. 


	4. Chapter 4

She stopped counting days when they reached the Oasis. It was nothing but a patch of water in the desert, nothing like the oases of her stories. But they had seeds, and the knowing of their old home in the lee of the mountains, and the Dag dug in the sand until her back ached and her hands bled. And, in a time that lasted both forever and took no time at all, there were tiny green shoots in that place, which had been dead. They held a celebration, and the Dag was as much one of them as if she had been as old and honored as Teacher. He looked very old, these days, and his daemon rarely had the energy to fly from her perch on his shoulder. 

It was the shape of those green shoots that the Dag pricked into the first finger on her right hand. She used needles from Pin’s treasured sewing kit, important enough to carry with him instead of food or water. She used ink from Teacher’s bag, the softest bag she’d ever seen, where he kept his three books and ink and _paper_ , which was the rarest thing in the world that the Dag knew of. 

She wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, and the first line wavered across her skin and bled as much as small spring of its own, and it hurt so much she had to bite her lip and have Pheona lick away her tears. But the second line was much cleaner, and the third was even better. The Dag held up her hand against the setting sunlight, spread her fingers wide, and admired the little black sprout that bloomed under her skin. 

“Now keep it out of the dirt tomorrow,” Pheona cautioned, because dirt caused sickness of the skin. Especially when the skin was bleeding. The Dag only scoffed, too pleased with herself to worry about tomorrow. 

“Of course I’ll keep it out of the dirt. And wash it once a day with spring water. And when it’s done bleeding and hurting I can make another.” 

Pheona only gave a half-hearted groan at the thought, but the Dag smiled and pulled her daemon close. “See, _now_ it’s a beginning. It’s like Teacher says, you have to write something down to make it real.”

“On your _skin_ , though? _Under_ your skin?” 

“This way I’ll always be able to read it,” the Dag said, though truly the idea had come from one of the books, and the words on skin had been put there by demons, not needles. Still, it seemed the principle was the same. And the backs of her fingers were so much easier to read. 


	5. Chapter 5

She measured time in the height of their sprouts, and how many leaves the little plants had, and the quality of the shelters they put up to shade the fragile seedlings from the worst of the sun at midday. By the measure of living, breathing things, there were leaves up to her waist when Death came to collect his due. 

They came over the ridge like dervishes, not caring about the twenty-foot cliff or the unforgiving mixture of stone and sand at the bottom. They came with engines roaring, with guns primed, and most of all, they came with the Gigahorse at their head, banners streaming, chrome shining bright and cruel under the sun. They came hungry for fire and blood, and they were not satisfied to mow down Mad Iggy where she was tending the plants, to rip up the delicate roots and spray vicious mud across the desperate faces of those who had just begun to run. 

Thunder boomed and the edges of the explosion caught the Dag and threw her, and she screamed when the stretched-cloth shelters caught fire with Pheona underneath them. The fox darted out, towards where the Dag was struggling to her feet, only to come within inches of a bike, engine running so hard she couldn’t hear anything over its roar, and two skeletons leaning down to grab at her. 

The daemon was forced back, and the War Boys were gone as quickly as they’d come, but she could barely see for smoke and the Dag was still screaming, and another _boom_ struck Pheona as heavy as a fist to her ribs. It pushed her into the air, just a few feet, and when she hit the ground again the she couldn’t breathe. Was that her, or the Dag, who was coughing from the smoke? 

And then it wasn’t screaming, because the Dag went silent when hands full of death and white powder picked her from the ground as easily as she would have picked a tuber or a stalk. Pheona cried out, wordless, when their bond was suddenly snapped tight, stretched to the limit. The Dag fought, silent as a ghost, but her fists were small and there was blood running from the lines of her sprout, and the War Boy barely noticed. 

The chaos lasted a long time. Pheona darted from hiding place to hiding place, but there was no rest from the smoke and the fire and the blood until their tiny new Oasis was reduced to a hollow made of muck and ash and death as heavy as lead on the tongue. And then the vixen was reduced to huddling as close as she could to Teacher’s body, or the lower half of it anyway, hoping that her mud-pointed fur could be mistaken for a bit of cloth or… anything, anything, so long as it wasn’t alive. 

The Dag was held as if she was no more than an inconveniently sized box to carry, under the arm of one of the War Boys, still struggling and hoping she would fall and be lost in the smoke and the mud until Pheona could find her. Until it was quiet, and safe again. 

_It will not ever be safe again_. 

And then it just… stopped. Everything stopped as suddenly as if the world had been shut off, only the wind was still blowing and the Dag was still breathing and the engine was still running. But they had stopped. She couldn’t see what they were looking at, but the attention of her captors was turned somewhere else, and out of shock as much as anything, she too fell still. 

And then she heard him. Through the mask, his voice was as harsh as sandstone against her skin, full of rage and triumph. “This is what happens to those who try and steal from me!” Joe’s shout was absorbed by the landscape, soaked up hungrily by the War Boys. “These Wretched took _my_ Aqua-Cola. Without permission. And it is with righteous fury that I struck them down! I am Immortan! And you, my half-life War Boys, you will destroy this place so that no one may desecrate it again! It will be a reminder of my might, and the power of the V8!”

There was a thrumming shout from the War Boys, welling up around the Dag like a poisonous wave, and she shivered with the violence in it. “ _V8! V8! V8! V8!”_

And then one broke the chant, and it was the Boy holding her like a sack of tubers, and the Dag scrambled at his arms, as agile as a fox, when he yelled out above them all, “IMMORTAN! SEE ME, IMMORTAN JOE!” 

The cries of _V8_ faded away as quickly as the roar of the engines had, and despite her struggling the Dag was brought forward. She still couldn’t _see_ , and then the arm was loosening and she was gone, gone – straight into the chest of another War Boy, who looked at her with black on his skeleton face and he almost looked _surprised_ , and she spun around and. There he was. The Immortan, standing on the Gigahorse with the sun lighting his back, inhuman teeth grimacing down at her. He looked more like a monster than any creature the Dag had ever seen. 

It was her terror that called Pheona to her, out of hiding, because they had been torn too far away from each other this whole time, and the ease of that terrible ache was enough to make the Dag sob. She bent, and none of the War Boys were fast enough to snag the fox daemon, who only leapt into her human’s arms. The Dag stayed crouched as small as she could be, shivering, at the edge of an empty space between the War Boys and their vengeful god. 

“What’s this?” He wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, no real living thing sounded like that. Sounded _amused_ when someone as small as the Dag trembled at his feet. 

“Please, Immortan, take this from me. A gift, worthy of You.” The War Boy, the one who’d caught her, he went down on one knee and locked his fingers into some strange salute, and the Dag could not see underneath his white paint but Pheona would have whispered that he was the same age they were, and where was his daemon? But she was too frightened, and all she did was watch.

“Stand her up, then,” the Immortan said with all the command of someone who had not been disobeyed in thousands of days, and someone jerked the Dag up by her hair, back to shoulder-length by now and still shimmering, even full of ash and dust. Pheona was barely recognizable as daemon, but she crouched at the Dag’s feet and hissed with pain as the Dag’s head screamed with the pressure. Her knees shook still, but she locked them straight, and watched as five War Boys (only they didn’t have the white paint, and all of them had foreheads black with grease, and she saw their daemons) helped Joe down from the hood of his hideous car. And then they extended a set of gilded stairs, and the Dag didn’t know the name for the hyena that stumped down them to stand next to her human, but she knew it was the ugliest daemon she had ever seen. 

The daemon always reflects the human, and so did Ilaria reflect Joe’s sickness in body and mind. Her fur was patchy, her stomach bloated. She walked with a heavy side-to-side step, muscular despite her ill form, and menacing for her size if nothing else; her hunched shoulders came up to Joe’s waist, and her wide head was lowered, sniffing after Pheona’s fearful growls. 

The Dag stood with her knees locked tight and her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth, looking up at the Immortan and swearing that she would not faint. She could be strong, strong as starlight. All the heroes in the books were strong, when they faced monsters. Still, she flinched when he touched her, ran possessive fingers along her cheek and shoulder, brushed dust off of her skin. She stood in silence for an eternity, waiting to die, to drop bloody and boneless, on the burned, cratered ground of the Oasis-that-had-been. 

“She’ll do,” Joe growled, and went to congratulate the War Boy, still on his knees. One of his retainers (his Imperators) grabbed the Dag by the arm, his griffon vulture taking Pheona by the scruff of her neck. Ilaria stayed to watch them with hungry, gleaming eyes, even as her human brought the War Boy to his feet. 

“I return your gift in full. You will ride eternal, McFeasting with my heroes. You will have your daemon back, shiny and chrome.”

Underneath the benediction, the Dag heard the others mutter _V8_ , and _chrome_ , and _daemons, he’ll have his daemon back_. And as she was shoved pulled into the Gigahorse, too worried about Pheona to resist, she turned and saw the paint dripping from skeletal lips, and saw a chrome-plated pistol that shimmered other-worldly in the monster’s hand, and heard the gunshot ripple through the War Boys with something like ecstasy. 

The one who had grabbed her up was barely bleeding. There was just a small hole in his head. The others cheered, roaring out their adulation, and again the violence in them washed against her like a wave. And the reason they could ride two to a bike, she saw with mounting horror, was that _none_ of them had daemons, not even the ones in cars. There were no daemons among them at all, but for the wretched hyena sniffing at the War Boy’s corpse, and the drooling wart hog of one of the Imperators. 

 


End file.
